The thing that strikes me most about this uber collections just how indecipherable many of these future UI’s are, and how unintuitive nearly **all** are.

I can only conclude from looking at these (and remembering many others from past sci-fi romps) that in Hollywood, and especially in the dark days of personal computing (when many of these movies were made), computers and their UI’s have nearly always looked absolutely inscrutable to most of the population, and that the only hope most civilians (not engineers) had for the future was that humanity would get genetically smarter as we advanced.

We would get smart enough that as a species, our brains would finally be able to treat these masses of poorly-laid-out information and instructions as a normal course of interfacing with machines, and would be able to process this stream of pixels in real time. It really says more about our hopes for the species in the future (less broken, reaching pinnacles of performance and capability) than it does about what we aspire from our machinery (which apparently, was very little – they would remain cryptic arbiters of control over our environment). I am SO GLAD that we have already at this point in computing technology found ways to start to think “human-first” in the human-computer interaction.

A perfect example of what I mean – Shane Koyczan: "To This Day" … for the bullied and beautiful:

And another that still resonates with me, long after the fact – Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight:

I’ve recently encountered the predictable yet still surprising backlash against TED Talks – backlash in the form of long rants by people I respect, but whose resistance and cynicism I can’t fully understand. Since I’m usually at the forefront of cynical distancing from something so popular, this exacerbated my naive shock and dismay.

I’m a convert to the TED phenomenon, and wonder every day when I still haven’t gotten around to watching more of them – because every time I do sit down for one, it makes me feel more a part of a global, expansive human experience, and gives a booster shot to my hope that there’s far more to life than drudgery, suffering and isolation.

[In response to complaints that TED Talks are simplistic, reductionist, and a one-way "conversation" to an incredibly privileged audience] I’ve been pleasantly surprised by many talks, and genuinely affected by a few. Privilege and reductionism aside, they’re still 20 minutes more I spend learning about a subject or having my perspective widened than I’d otherwise spend.

Further, I find a deep pool of irony in complaining about about TED’s short attention on Facebook.

[In response to concerns that a one-way compressed monologue doesn’t suit some people’s learning styles, and that the one-way nature and a subtle "attitude" embedded in it creeps some people out] I can easily accept that it isn’t suitable to how your brain learns – I know how much of a learning failure I am through books, and how well I assimilate and integrate new ideas through the Meetup approach. Which tells me that for me, Meetups or other forums where we get to have lectures where questions are welcome, plus loosely related discussions around it, are my ideal learning model.

Close second is the unconference like Agile Open Northwest – where we get to hear lots of 0-day thoughts shared by people who want a very barrier-free, interactive discussion on subjects that are just-proposed-today and are low risk (since they’re selected through vote-with-your-feet) so high-value subjects abound for nearly everyone. No "selection" (aka pre-screening) committees so no groupthink filters.

But still none of this invalidates the 20-minute, polished-and-scrubbed summary of decades worth of work or life. If you can’t convey one good idea in 20 minutes, I sure ain’t giving you an hour or a book’s worth of attention. Must be why reading long-form books or journal articles seems so excruciating to me now – instead of one thesis, it seems to grant license to jam in several loosely related thoughts.

Maybe it’s the talks I’ve seen and remember – speakers from whom I detect a subtle nervousness, a little extra humanity – not the supra-polished talks that look like they’ve been given a million times and couldn’t provide less of a connection to their audience if they were delivered from within a gameshow soundproof booth.